A small village in Germany is generating income for all residents and a second cash crop for farmers with a community wind farm that dates back to 1999, recently boosted its capacity from four turbines to eight, and now produces about 50 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, enough to power about 16,000 homes.
“Raa-Besenbek, a community of 600 people in the northern Schleswig-Holstein region, has been sold on wind for years,” Inside Climate News reports. “These community-funded turbines and thousands like them are helping Germany weather the energy crisis brought about by a cutoff of natural gas from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine last year.”
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Johann Koeling, a former farmer who was one of the village’s 39 original investors along with his wife, Maren, said local generation is one of the best ways to build support for wind projects. Those original shares cost DM5,000 each, or about €2,500 today, and funded four turbines production 13 million kWh per year. Nearly a quarter-century later, 125 of the village’s 600 residents have bought in.
“It’s difficult to convince people otherwise who are very strongly against wind energy,” Koeling said. “It’s a lot easier when you live in a small community like this and can all talk about it.”
The news story on Inside Climate News profiles the kind of rural community that often rallies against wind development—or if you happen to be in Ontario, ripping finished turbines out of the ground after they’ve been built. In Raa-Besenbek, the wind farm has been central to keeping local farmers in business.
A Second Cash Crop for Farmers
“The meadows on which wind turbines are built in Raa-Besenbek mostly belong to farmers,” Inside Climate explains. “For families like the Koelings, who have found it increasingly hard to keep up their farm operations amid rising prices for fertilizer, fuel, and other basics, wind power is a second source of income. It allows them not only to make ends meet but also shrug off the fear of losing land that has been in their families for generations.”
“Oftentimes, farmers would have to close their businesses if it wasn’t for renewables,” Koeling said.
With recent changes under Germany’s 2021 Renewable Energy Act, villagers who’ve invested in the wind farm receive a guaranteed share of the income, at a rate of 0.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, and most of the tax revenue on that income stays in the community.
That means “it’s not that an outside company is coming in” and pulling the profit out of the community, said the project’s managing director, Hans-Hermann Magens. “That changes the attitude toward these wind farms, because the wind turbines are their own—they belong to the people and to the village.”
Inside Climate traces the success in Raa-Besenbek back to early opposition to nuclear power development in Germany, originally triggered by the Chornobyl disaster in Ukraine and cemented by the Fukushima meltdown in Japan. It also points to delays in onshore wind development in Germany and the “significant local and federal hurdles” that projects face—from grid capacity to state forestry laws.
Kristina Clemens, a spokesperson for the German Wind Energy Association, said the country’s extensive permitting process for new wind projects can take up to five years to complete. “By contrast, she notes that even some members of Germany’s Green Party rapidly approved floating terminals for processing imported liquefied natural gas in response to the cutoff in natural gas from Russia,” Inside Climate writes. “The first offshore terminal went online in December.”
“It’s not helpful to [just] say, ‘We’ve set aside 2% of Germany’s land area for the use of wind energy,’” she said. “Accelerated approval procedures are really important because LNG terminals showed how fast the permit process can be, if everyone wants it.”
22,830 Projects Across Europe
But Germany isn’t the only place where community energy is making its mark. A paper last March in the journal Nature Scientific Reports identified nine distinct forms that citizen-led energy initiatives can take in Europe, adding up to 22,830 projects supported by two million people installing 7.2 to 9.9 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity, with investment of €6.2 to €11.3 billion.
The list includes local projects in Crete, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Spain, and Sweden, with local approaches ranging from energy, housing, or sustainable mobility co-ops to energy clusters and eco-villages. One of the entities, a 1,300-member rural electrification co-op in France, has been in operation since 1919.
In Scotland, many of the country’s 570 community energy projects are run by charities, writes energytransition.org.
“Citizens participate as founders, members, educators, entrepreneurs, consultants, technicians, creators, troubleshooters, and workers,” the journal paper stated. “They collectively produce renewable-based electricity and heat generated from solar, wind, hydropower, and biomass. Also, they raise awareness, consult on energy efficiency, contribute to sustainability plans, and organize low-carbon mobility.
“Funds are raised from private individuals, members, government actors, and other sources” the authors added, and “with many participants, even small contributions add up. These citizens increase energy self-sufficiency, lower energy costs for members and customers, contribute to local development, and raise social acceptance for the energy transition.”
While the estimates in the paper “do not suggest that collective action will replace commercial enterprises and governmental action in the short or medium term without fundamental alterations to policy and market structures,” the authors said, “we find strong evidence for the historical, emerging, and actual importance of citizen‐led collective action to the European energy transition.”
